A Web3 strategy game built around a prediction × rock-paper-scissors mechanic adapted from Vladimir Understanding's tabletop ruleset. I led visual direction across the world, characters, brand, landing, conceptual interface, and 3D illustration — and ran the freelance art team in the first year of production.
Posthuman is a Cosmos validator with its own product ecosystem. Vladimir had been refining a tabletop strategy game — turn flow combines prediction with counter-selection (rock-paper-scissors), and players accumulate resources to get victory points. The brief was to translate that ruleset into a Web3-native digital game.
When I joined, there was no world, no characters, no visual language, no interface — only mechanics on paper.
When I joined, there was no world, no characters, no visual language, no interface — only mechanics on paper.
Context
First look, thought that's the main problem is a concept, but later it reveals with resources. The team was small, and hiring was hard — there was no luxury of a separate brand designer, world artist, character artist, UI designer, motion designer. Visual direction across the entire surface — world, characters, brand, locations, interface, NFT items, landing, motion — sat with me, with one supporting artist brought in for style exploration. Everything else followed from that: scope decisions, where to go deep vs. where to hold the line at concept, what stayed in Miro vs. what got pushed through to render.
Constraint
The actual working environment for this project was Miro — the full game design lived there: board logic, turn structure, location maps, resource flows, character placement, interface schemas.
1. Game schema in Miro — with Vladimir. Turn flow, resource logic, location maps, interface schemas.
2. Style exploration · brand · landing (parallel). Hired the supporting artist — joint sketching, heavy reference research, locked the marble-and-gold direction and the gothic-modern "M". Brand identity (monogram, palette, typography) crystallized out of this process. Landing was built in the same window as a visual pitch of the direction, not a final assembly at the end.
3. Production: characters · locations · interface · illustrations. The longest phase. Parallel tracks, constant testing, corrections, and iteration as the world matured. Hired three more artists across this stretch to work on character actors, landing illustrations, and in-game action cards. I worked with them as art director — running brief and review on each piece, keeping everyone inside the setting. Selected originals were then pushed further in ComfyUI to lift them where needed.
4. Design documentation and infographics. Made for community and investors — primarily for investors. The output was a strong investor presentation.
5. Motion. Concept loops for the landing and pitch materials.
Four artists hired across the 2.5 years total.
1. Game schema in Miro — with Vladimir. Turn flow, resource logic, location maps, interface schemas.
2. Style exploration · brand · landing (parallel). Hired the supporting artist — joint sketching, heavy reference research, locked the marble-and-gold direction and the gothic-modern "M". Brand identity (monogram, palette, typography) crystallized out of this process. Landing was built in the same window as a visual pitch of the direction, not a final assembly at the end.
3. Production: characters · locations · interface · illustrations. The longest phase. Parallel tracks, constant testing, corrections, and iteration as the world matured. Hired three more artists across this stretch to work on character actors, landing illustrations, and in-game action cards. I worked with them as art director — running brief and review on each piece, keeping everyone inside the setting. Selected originals were then pushed further in ComfyUI to lift them where needed.
4. Design documentation and infographics. Made for community and investors — primarily for investors. The output was a strong investor presentation.
5. Motion. Concept loops for the landing and pitch materials.
Four artists hired across the 2.5 years total.
Pipeline
Everything went through several rounds.
Locations and characters together. First I wanted exterior locations — ground-perspective compositions of the place. Couldn't fit several actors at full height into the frame. Switched to split-screen with interiors — same actor-fit problem. Tried 3D city with actors standing at full height — also didn't work. The unlock was keeping the 3D world (still ugly at that stage) and pulling actors out of the world entirely — turning them into tokens. That's where the medallion system actually came from. It wasn't an aesthetic choice up front; it fell out of a fit problem.
City model. First 3D pass was too noisy and high-contrast. I tried to repair it with color and lighting — it didn't repair. So I rebuilt the city in an isometric-game register: one large building, everything else micro, schematic but in 3D. That's the version that stayed.
Locations and characters together. First I wanted exterior locations — ground-perspective compositions of the place. Couldn't fit several actors at full height into the frame. Switched to split-screen with interiors — same actor-fit problem. Tried 3D city with actors standing at full height — also didn't work. The unlock was keeping the 3D world (still ugly at that stage) and pulling actors out of the world entirely — turning them into tokens. That's where the medallion system actually came from. It wasn't an aesthetic choice up front; it fell out of a fit problem.
City model. First 3D pass was too noisy and high-contrast. I tried to repair it with color and lighting — it didn't repair. So I rebuilt the city in an isometric-game register: one large building, everything else micro, schematic but in 3D. That's the version that stayed.
Iteration
Everything went through several rounds.
Locations and characters together. First I wanted exterior locations — ground-perspective compositions of the place. Couldn't fit several actors at full height into the frame. Switched to split-screen with interiors — same actor-fit problem. Tried 3D city with actors standing at full height — also didn't work. The unlock was keeping the 3D world (still ugly at that stage) and pulling actors out of the world entirely — turning them into tokens. That's where the medallion system actually came from. It wasn't an aesthetic choice up front; it fell out of a fit problem.
City model. First 3D pass was too noisy and high-contrast. I tried to repair it with color and lighting — it didn't repair. So I rebuilt the city in an isometric-game register: one large building, everything else micro, schematic but in 3D. That's the version that stayed.
Locations and characters together. First I wanted exterior locations — ground-perspective compositions of the place. Couldn't fit several actors at full height into the frame. Switched to split-screen with interiors — same actor-fit problem. Tried 3D city with actors standing at full height — also didn't work. The unlock was keeping the 3D world (still ugly at that stage) and pulling actors out of the world entirely — turning them into tokens. That's where the medallion system actually came from. It wasn't an aesthetic choice up front; it fell out of a fit problem.
City model. First 3D pass was too noisy and high-contrast. I tried to repair it with color and lighting — it didn't repair. So I rebuilt the city in an isometric-game register: one large building, everything else micro, schematic but in 3D. That's the version that stayed.
Outcome
The game runs on the blockchain — new technology, real innovation — and the visual style had to carry that. Futurism was the register I chose before any specific element: it set the tone for the world, the architecture, the type, the icons, and the characters.
"M" monogram + Metarchy wordmark. Built in a couple hours. The wordmark uses a custom typeface I'd already developed for Sputnik. The "M" itself I decorated separately as the icon mark — pulling on the project's core feel: futurism, alien flair, strictness, structure.
Marble + gold + geometry = utopia. The world is a clean, bright future. Robots handle material-resource extraction; humans concentrate on non-material values. That cleanness — that utopian read — lives in marble and gold. The geometric forms carry structure and precision; part of the game runs on-chain and can be played for stakes, so the visual language had to feel that exact. The "M" monogram follows the same logic.
Medallion portraits. Originally I planned full-body characters so as much of the NFT-clothing set as possible would be visible at once. Stacked against everything else on the screen it became a mess. The icon-portrait + circular interface is what fell out — clean, consistent character read, items live elsewhere.
Resource form-language. I designed a visual language that mapped each resource to a primitive form — Power → triangle / pyramid, Science → geometric construct, Art → liquid rounded forms, and so on across the rest. The plan was for this language to carry through architecture, locations, and icons in one consistent system.
In practice it landed only in the architecture — the buildings carried the form-language. The icons went a different route: they started as alien, hard-to-read, and too similar to each other, and resolved into small, colorful, recognizable marks driven by what a player has to read at a glance under turn pressure.
Locations. 3D because after all tests with 2D, i realized the it must be in 3D Isometric way. Low-poly because I planned detail through textures — which is why I built the UV unwraps clean from the start.
Interface breaktrough. Designed end-to-end. Nothing flashy beyond one move — the circular token / bet selection menu. The rest was solid systematic UI work without a breakthrough moment.
The interface background was originally specced as light marble, matching the initial visual code. On practice it wouldn't read as unified with the gameplay backdrop, so I shifted it to dark gray — still stone, just the shadow side of the same material.
NFT items breakdown — four tech-level styles. Base setting is fantasy, so I split items by technology level rather than character or class:
"M" monogram + Metarchy wordmark. Built in a couple hours. The wordmark uses a custom typeface I'd already developed for Sputnik. The "M" itself I decorated separately as the icon mark — pulling on the project's core feel: futurism, alien flair, strictness, structure.
Marble + gold + geometry = utopia. The world is a clean, bright future. Robots handle material-resource extraction; humans concentrate on non-material values. That cleanness — that utopian read — lives in marble and gold. The geometric forms carry structure and precision; part of the game runs on-chain and can be played for stakes, so the visual language had to feel that exact. The "M" monogram follows the same logic.
Medallion portraits. Originally I planned full-body characters so as much of the NFT-clothing set as possible would be visible at once. Stacked against everything else on the screen it became a mess. The icon-portrait + circular interface is what fell out — clean, consistent character read, items live elsewhere.
Resource form-language. I designed a visual language that mapped each resource to a primitive form — Power → triangle / pyramid, Science → geometric construct, Art → liquid rounded forms, and so on across the rest. The plan was for this language to carry through architecture, locations, and icons in one consistent system.
In practice it landed only in the architecture — the buildings carried the form-language. The icons went a different route: they started as alien, hard-to-read, and too similar to each other, and resolved into small, colorful, recognizable marks driven by what a player has to read at a glance under turn pressure.
Locations. 3D because after all tests with 2D, i realized the it must be in 3D Isometric way. Low-poly because I planned detail through textures — which is why I built the UV unwraps clean from the start.
Interface breaktrough. Designed end-to-end. Nothing flashy beyond one move — the circular token / bet selection menu. The rest was solid systematic UI work without a breakthrough moment.
The interface background was originally specced as light marble, matching the initial visual code. On practice it wouldn't read as unified with the gameplay backdrop, so I shifted it to dark gray — still stone, just the shadow side of the same material.
NFT items breakdown — four tech-level styles. Base setting is fantasy, so I split items by technology level rather than character or class:
- Low — apocalyptic, downshifters, religious / cult.
- Casual — typical megapolis resident, year 30579.
- Classic sci-fi / cyberpunk — high tech.
- Cross-cultural sci-fi — top tier, leaning toward fantasy: cultures merged, magical-technological-mystical.
Visual decisions
Logo avatar for social media
Interface and map
Actors
Tokens
Resources
Cards
NFT Concept
Locations in UE5
Locations pipeline
OLD
Market Interface Concept
Basic NFT for starter pack
Rare NFT for starter pack
Documentation design
